In Which I Learn to Love That Which I Previously Loathed
How great are figs? I’ve been tentatively eating them more and more. At the store the other night, I selected them over dried apples to feed my fiendish need for carbohydrates these days. My father would be proud.
I am about to tell you a charming family story:
My family used to have part of a timeshare in Palm Springs, and we’d go there when work called my father out to LA. When I was four, my father spent a good part of his vacay concerned (my mother might use the term ‘obsessed’) about the apparent constipation of his young (and adorable) progeny.
That’s me.
To the head-shaking bemusement of my mother, my father became convinced that feeding me lots and lots of figs was the only way to solve this pressing problem. (Again, my mother might dispute the severity of the problem, and perhaps also the use of the word ‘problem’ to describe the situation.) My father, however, was not to be dissuaded, and I was handed fig after fig after fig.
I really did not like figs. It was not a fun couple days.
My father’s consternation grew as my system seemed wholly unaffected by the absurd amount of fibre he was pumping into it.
Only when we started cleaning the apartment in preparation for leaving did my continued constipation become clear: they began finding figs everywhere.
I had hidden them in plants, behind the phonebook, between couch cushions - they’d gone pretty much everywhere except my mouth.
My parents were shocked - my father by the subterfuge, my mother by the number of figs I’d been given (and she didn’t know the half of it; in my memory, I chucked a good number of them off the balcony).
My parents spent the next half an hour attempting to get their young (and somewhat less-adorable-seeming) progeny to detail the locations of quietly rotting figs.
It was the most food/father-related head shaking I’ve ever seen out of my mother. (Aside, of course, from the night she went to Springfield and my father fed me so much red cabbage and mayonnaise that I vomited. That, however, is a story for a different day.)
Despite this background, I’ve found in recent years that I quite like my Palm Springs nemeses. And, on occasion, my father - provided he’s not on a mission.
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